A Maple Ridge mother says she was robbed of more than personal belongings after a storage locker she was renting was broken into last Sunday.
She was robbed of her late daughter’s belongings, items she wasn’t ready to part with yet.
Julie Raymond’s daughter Shannon died in 2008, when the 16-year-old overdosed after taking an ecstasy pill on a party bus.
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Following her death, Raymond and her other daughter Danielle, spent years fighting for improved safety on party buses that resulted in new rules enacted by the provincial government in April last year.
Now all party buses must have a safety monitor on board anytime there are minors on the bus and that monitor must be trained in first aid, including administering Naloxone. Operators are also required to obtain consent forms from parents and guardians.
Raymond had put everything belonging to Shannon into the locker – from baby items to a police evidence box with sealed plastic bags containing all of the items her daughter had on her the night she died.
“We had left those sealed as the police had given them to us. The thief ripped those open and took a lot of those things,” said Raymond.
“I wasn’t ready to part with them and the thief took that away from me.”
“That’s why they were there, because we weren’t ready to say goodbye to those things,” she added.
The locker that Raymond was renting was on the inside of a Mayfair Self Storage building along Stewart Crescent, in an industrial area of Maple Ridge.
She was contacted by the owners of the storage facility on Wednesday and told her locker might have been compromised.
When Raymond went to the facility to have a look, she said the lock on the unit was not hers. She believes somebody with a code to the building had entered and cut off her lock, replacing it with their own, giving them time to go through the locker unnoticed.
Other lockers had been broken into as well, Raymond has been told.
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However, it was clear, that the items in her locker belonged to a deceased person.
“They went through her funeral box,” said Raymond.
The thief also took two guitars that belonged to her son-in-law, one, a 1960s Gibson’s Blue Ridge guitar, that was given to him by his brother.
The value of the contents stolen from the locker is more than $10,000.
But what Raymond wants back are the items that belonged to Shannon – including a designer wallet and her bag.
“They have violated my daughter in the worst possible way they could have,” said Raymond.
“They robbed me of my right to part with her belongings. Have a heart and give them back.”
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